Jo Cox with dad Gordon and mum Jean, who are organising this year's Great Get Together event

The annual event — a nationwide series of street parties, mass picnics, barbecues and the like — aims to bring communities together and celebrate all that unites us — Jo believed that as a nation “far more unites us than divides us”.

Jo, who was elected Labour MP for Batley and Spen in 2015, also worked to highlight the hidden crisis of loneliness — part of her legacy is that there is now a “minister for loneliness”, Tracey Crouch.

Join The Great Get Together

DON’T wait for the Great Get Together weekend – connect4jo today by taking a “heart” photo with at least one person who is not family or a close pal.

Email it to sundayfeatures@the-sun.co.uk with your name, address and number with “connect4jo” as the subject line. Jo’s sister Kim will pick the most creative photo to win £500 to organise your own Get Together.

Before their daughter’s death, Jean and Gordon had settled into happy retirement at 55 — Jean having worked as a school bursar and Gordon as a production manager — and downsized to a beautiful bungalow in Kirklees, West Yorks.

Speaking from their smart living room, Jean said: “We wanted a quiet retirement — Jo will be up there laughing. She’s landed us in it but we want to continue her work, to keep her legacy going.

Jo Cox addressed Parliament in March 2016 just months before she was shot in her constituency

Jean recalled: “Jo turned into a child when she was with them, playing in the back garden,
making snowmen, rolling on the floor. When she was out meeting constituents we’d get them bathed, ready for bed, settled down. The minute she walked in, there was chaos again!”

She continued: “We talk very normally and naturally about Jo with them and answer their questions.

“Recently we said, ‘What would your mum have said about this?’ They replied, ‘Oh bugger’. She would!

Gordon’s favourite memories are from when his daughters were the same age as his grandchildren are now. He recalled: “When we wanted to get them in from the garden for bedtime we would pick a child each and then run after them. They would run in different directions because they loved being chased.

“When I see Lejla playing, I have to do a double take. Just for a second I think . . . they are so similar.

“Then I have to get some fresh air.”

Despite her amazing career, Jo’s parents admit she was also “quiet, shy, dizzy and forgetful”.
Jean said: “She was amazing but she wasn’t perfect.

Four Ex-Prime ministers pay tribute to Jo Cox as part of 'The Great Get Together'

“The amount of times she would come up from London, then get a taxi here and she’d run in and say, ‘I’ve no cash, can you pay the taxi?’ She’d say, ‘I’ve got to go to the mosque this morning, can I borrow your trousers and your scarf?’ Food, clothes and money, — she’d never have them.”

Gordon added: “She once went on a cycling holiday and forgot to take her bike. She was always looking at the bigger picture.”

And the bigger picture was always helping others. After suffering terrible homesickness while she was at Cambridge University, Jo knew what loneliness felt like.

Jean said: “She wasn’t motivated by money or possessions, it was all about making a difference to people.

Jo's parents say their daughter wasn't perfect but she always thought about helping others before herself

On the anniversary of Jo’s murder, the couple will join her husband Brendan and family from both sides “to be together and remember” and visit the remote spot where country-loving Jo’s ashes are scattered.

Gordon said: “She’d been all around the world, shot at in Afghanistan and hospitalised with a killer tropical disease, before coming back to good old Yorkshire, nice and safe.

“How unlucky that this man happened to live just down the road. But if somebody had said to her on that day, ‘You’re in danger, don’t go to your surgery’, she would still have done it.

She wouldn’t give up on a commitment.

Volunteers from Jo Cox inspired charity The Great Get Together bring flowers to Finsbury Park

On the weekend of June 22 they will join people around the UK to celebrate the Great Get Together.

In Batley there will be a giant Iftar, or evening feast, during Ramadan with food from local restaurants, plus a rugby match, a fun day and a run.

Gordon and Jean will visit as many events as they can. Jean said: “If people have taken the trouble to organise an event in Jo’s memory it is only right that we go to see it.

“We always ask ourselves, ‘Would Jo like this or want this?’ We know she would love it, she loved a party. I think Jo would be proud of us.

“At last year’s Iftar I met people who are now friends for life.

“Without that event our paths may never have crossed. I hope people get together and organise events, it would mean so much to Jo.

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“Last year a group of children from Birmingham stood together and formed a heart shape with Jo’s name in the middle, so we are asking people to recreate a heart pose with another person to show how people can come together.”

She added: “Jo would not have changed a thing in her life. She was happy, she had achieved so much, but I still miss her, every day.

“Even now when the phone rings, for a second, I think, ‘Oh it’s Jo’.”

Tracey Croach speaks about her new role as Minister for Loneliness saying she is 'humbled' to be taking on the work of Jo Cox